What’s truly regrettable about The Wedding Ringer is that, at certain moments, it almost succeeds as a heartfelt comedy about male friendship in which its two stars, Josh Gad and Kevin Hart, get to demonstrate that they can act.

While this HBO-produced, generically titled family caper isn't quite as dead as you'd expect, it doesn't exactly pulsate with comic originality. Borrowing from successful comedies of recent years, from Big to Risky Business, it bounces along with a familiar, pre-sold air.

Diana isn’t just an egregious case of rewriting history, but one of oversimplifying it.

The movie streamlines much of Harris's book. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

You know you're in trouble when the cars in a science fiction movie look like those golf carts with football helmets on them. That's if the presence of Emilio Estevez wasn't already enough of a tip-off...Though the action is nonstop, it's so unengaging that we might as well be watching a blank screen.

Self/less bears not a trace of Singh’s signature visual richness, quickly devolving into a tiresome game of cat and mouse, padded with cliched fight scenes, car chases and shootouts.

Pfarrer's screenplay feels older than the Martian hills.

It is surprising that no matter how much we know what will happen, we never stop watching.

I'm not sure if it was that or the cloying script, but after a couple of hours of spinning around listening to this drivel I felt like I was going to barf.

Regardless of the cute little hats and clam-diggers she wears, it's impossible to believe Kidman as a breathless ingenue; that relentless drive and steely Kidmanesque determination keep jutting through the cotton in flinty, sharp-edged shards.

A not-as-bad-as-you-think-it-is romantic comedy.

Mottola and LeSieur seem to have actively avoided the pursuit of wisdom, settling for broad gags — and the occasional explosion — instead.

There ought to be no lack of firepower in telling this shameful tale. Too often, however, Bitter Harvest is guilty of overkill.

The relentless vulgarities in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past would be almost tolerable if they were amusing, but Mark Waters's direction is so tentative that the film's single laugh happens more than an hour in.

The story offers uncommon insights on the endlessly parsed period in history, but its execution sometimes falls short. Both the production quality and the persistent, sentimental soundtrack create a made-for-TV feel.

The makers of Miss Congeniality 2 have violated the cardinal rule of Sandra Bullock cinema. They turned her into someone unlikable.

Harmless romantic and musical high jinks abound, and sentimentality prevails.

Fittingly, My Life in Ruins goes downhill after its title.

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

The characters in Aloft seem to float over their strong passions, like birds riding on columns of air, without ever alighting. I kept waiting for the sharp sting of a talon to take hold of my heart, but it never came.

The Dark Tower isn’t frightening, or even, despite some serviceable action and special effects, very interesting, except perhaps for viewers too young to know better, or for Stephen King fans especially susceptible to outright pandering.

As Kaulder, Diesel does what he does, rumbling out lines of silly dialogue in his subwoofer of a voice. As far as acting goes, there’s not much.

In lieu of genuine high jinks, a series of escalating slapstick pranks ensues between Peter and Ed, including mishaps with a drone, a snake and a human corpse. None of them is especially amusing.

Well shot, well edited, well paced, Deepstar Six seems to have gone to the idea-well just a bit too often -- or is that not often enough? While the creature is an average creation, the underwater visual effects are often quite good, if not plentiful enough. [14 Jan 1989]

They (De Niro, Burns) look good together. But what a staggering pity they chose such a nasty, hackneyed movie to demonstrate their chemistry.

Eddie Murphy is less offensive than Dr. Seuss.

The hero's hilarious efforts to become an ROTC commander at a Virginia prep school are more than enough ammunition for this riotous military parody.

What can you say when a video game is more exciting and entertaining than the big-budget feature film it inspires?

Ferrell and Hart have a genial, easygoing chemistry and Get Hard manages to score more than a few good points about facile assumptions and toxic hypocrisy.

The plot stumbles over genre cliches after a promising start and the whole thing becomes lamentable. As an indictment of a techno-society in which too much information is available by computer, it's simply unconvincing.

A movie devoted to baroque revenge would be, on its own terms, acceptable; what makes Law Abiding Citizen so risible is its humorless conviction that it's got Big Ideas at its core.

Demolition Man is a futuristic cop picture with slightly more imagination and wit than the typical example of the slash-and-burn genre.

They're certainly no Aykroyd and Belushi, or even Myers and Carvey, but Farley and Spade manage to wring humor from a series of juvenile setups and predictable pratfalls. The belly laughs come easy when Farley's tumbling down a mountain or being dragged behind a car by his necktie. Director Penelope Spheeris ("Wayne's World") keeps up a head-banging pace, barreling past Spade's flat jokes and Farley's limited character range.

The setup is so conducive to hedonistic wish-fulfillment that it's a pity writer Dan Greenburg and director Alan Myerson lacked the wit to capitalize on it. [20 Nov 1981, p.C3]

Michael Bay is destroying horror films by exhuming the genre's standard-bearers, stripping them of genuine terror, refusing to either re-create faithfully or reimagine boldly, and upping the irony until the original concept stands rigid like a taxidermied grizzly, its teeth bared but its presence, most of all, sad.

There are goofy, primal pleasures to be had in the first two-thirds of the film. But Beyond the Reach exceeds even its humble grasp in the final act, collapsing in a clatter of blockheaded manhunter-movie cliches. Crazy is one thing, but dumb is unforgivable.

Not only is the picture woefully short on laughs, it's also coarse, overbearing and, in places, downright insulting.

A lowbrow, only fitfully amusing comedy.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

Very much the cheap knockoff of its prototype, but not half as visceral.

As little as there is to recommend in Scooby-Doo 2, it must be noted that the human cast has done an uncanny job of inhabiting their two-dimensional characters.

A loud, standard-issue sci-fi action film that has a confusing mission.

Almost every narrative choice is ludicrous. And yet, “Mercy” is also a hoot and a half.

Almost everything about Smurfs 2 signifies an improvement over the original.

Wondrous visuals only go so far, in a film that turns out to be lethally dull.

Like the jokes, the brothers' rapport seems recycled from childhood. Sheen and Estevez are hardly working.

Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.

But seriously, folks, if you're going to make a scary movie, shouldn't you be able to do it without resorting to both "Blair Witch"-style found footage and movie stars? (Will Patton and Elias Koteas also show up as, respectively, an angry sheriff and a psychologist friend of Abbey's.)

From the outset, The Possession is calculated to make an alternately ludicrous and sadistic spectacle of the family's victimization.

Glossy, flossy and blithely secure in its own cheerfully fake worldview, Baggage Claim bypasses the intellect entirely, happy to satisfy on a silly, screwball, wish-fulfillment level. It could have been so much better, but for racking up undemanding escapist flyer miles, it’ll do.

All fire-and-brimstone bunk, a tired compendium of involuntary crucifixions, grim messages carved into human flesh, fly buzzings, ominous choral chants on the soundtrack and at least one head twisting.

Tedious.

This is definitely a family trip to stay home and skip.

It's laughably stupid, only fitfully scary and relatively harmless summer fun – if you're 12 years old, in which case you probably aren't supposed to be going to movies like this anyway.

All the characters mumble, perhaps out of sympathy for the Dutch Van Damme's ongoing struggle with their native language. As for plot, it unravels more quickly than the mystery facing Van Damme.

Ten minutes after you leave the movie, all the battles will have blended in your memory into a ceaseless muddle of sliced-off appendages, jets of blood splashing artfully on walls, gurgling screams and flashing swords.

While director Jamie Babbit, who cut her teeth on indie comedies, is an equal- opportunity offender, some jokes land better than others. Still, strong lead performances and an energetic supporting cast elevate the uneven material.

My All American plays like an extended highlights reel, not a movie.

It’s more silly than scary.

This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.

If it were the last videotape available in the only video store in the remotest corner of Alaska, I'd take one last slug of Jack Daniels and start walking directly into the howling snows.

They made a movie without one basic ingredient: the story.

Nothing if not monumentally obsessed, Mann seems to be volunteering himself as the American film industry's answer to the cinema of ultraportentous imagery and crackpot visionary affectation. One imagines him entering the unofficial competition trailing swirls of smoke or ground fog and radiating backlit shafts of light, like half the characters in his movie. [17 Dec 1983, p.B3]

Clan's greatest fault, however, is simply that it is an epic bore. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

This one's for Silverstone fans only.

The nonsensical screenplay can barely stand-up to the hellzapoppin, Beelzebubbin effects mustered by first-time director Mark Dippe.

One part Joseph Campbell hero quest, one part multi-culti morality tale, one part live-action "Flintstones" cartoon, 10,000 B.C. is finally every part just plain nuts, from a hike featuring more ecosystems than an Al Gore documentary to a wacky climax set amid pyramids that -- you'll e-mail me if I'm wrong -- wouldn't have been built for another 7,000 years or so.

Lazily written by Stiller and three collaborators (including Justin Theroux), this is the kind of lame, warmed-over movie that gives sequels a bad name. For “Zoolander” fans, however, it resembles a betrayal of public trust.

Largely relies on stale gender stereotypes and tired comedy routines that don't elicit much laughter.

There's little here to offend anyone, and even less here to excite anyone.

It's painful watching a talented thespian diminish himself so. It's clear he did it for the Benjamins.

Safe Haven is one of those Valentine’s Day confections that satisfy your sweet tooth until you get to their weird, off-putting center. The problem with movies is that you can’t put them back in the box.

There's sure nothing purgative about the kind of anxiety the filmmakers are exploiting. If anything, it condemns them to strictly degenerate company. [24 Mar 1981, p.B8]

Lazy, scattershot and excruciatingly unfunny, the movie is a hazard to the very young, who might come away with the erroneous impression that movies don’t get any better than this.

1941 represents an appalling waste of filmmaking and performing resources. As one would expect, Spielberg, who directed "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," sustains a high energy level. But the energy is expended on material that is pointless at best and occasionally hateful. [15 Dec 1979, p.C1]

A 90-minute confessathon minus the bleeped-out cuss words and pixelated breasts.

About as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.

It takes a very special director to make scenes of sky-diving, free climbing, big-wave surfing and BASE jumping something to yawn at. Yet Ericson Core must be that kind of miracle worker, because Point Break, his update of the 1991 cult classic, is basically a cavalcade of extreme sports, but with less drama than a highlight reel.

The story is more undead than all of these revenant shufflers. And the orgy of gore and home-engineered special effects doesn't make up for the shortfall.

There's something scuzzy about the whole exercise.

The plot feels arbitrary and seems driven to invent new places for its protagonists to go, as if to justify a budget on which Woody Allen could have made six much better films.

What it suffers from most is the sense of offhand storytelling that lies halfway between creative laziness and cost-cutting sloppiness.

There isn't anything here you haven't seen already in It's a Wonderful Life and a thousand other wish-list movies. Writer/director James Orr doesn't even do you the favor of speeding through the unoriginality.

The big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis.

For the most part, Vacation is a sad, cynical rip-off of writer John Hughes’s source material. No one expects originality, but the new movie may end up making history: It’s already looking like the worst movie of the year.

With Love Hurts, 87North has gone farther south than ever, churning out a muddled, mean-spirited action comedy that manages to feel slack and listless despite a flyweight run time of only 83 minutes.

Because of the square, lackluster way that director Michael Gottleib has staged his material, the whole production seems sort of limp and perfunctory.

Jonah Hex may not be the longest 81 minutes you ever spend, but it might well be the most tedious.

Head-scratchingly ordinary, given Schwarzenegger's need to prove he's still a virile (i.e., non-aging) action hero.

It is the perfect modern product: loud, banal, empty, frenzied, plasticized, flavorless, drab, violent in a bloodless way and sexy in a sexless way.

The movie is going to be fine for PG-ready audiences, assuming they don't have a problem with extremely predictable story turns.

Equilibrium is like a remake of "1984" by someone who's seen "The Matrix" 25 times while eating Twinkies and doing methamphetamines.

If only Shadowboxer had gone for more than an unwavering commitment to imitate better movies, it might have been one for the cult shelves at the video store. Right now, you'll be lucky if you find it in the giveaway bin.

The movie does nothing special or surprising, but it doesn’t particularly offend, either.

Howell, a second-string Rob Lowe, has the title role in this embarrassing variation on "Black Like Me," a half-witted collegiate farce guaranteed to offend just about everybody. Blacks are stereotyped as they haven't been in decades, and whites are portrayed as Boston bigots and selfish preppies. But the really pathetic thing about this tired old knee-jerker is not that it's racist, but that it's racist and doesn't even know it.

The plot of The Glimmer Man involves not only the Family Man but Our Evil Secret Government, the Russian Mafia and Rich Powerful Politicians -- the three stooges of action cinema in the '90s.

Although he brings a certain muscular prowess to the screen, Norris is grievously deficient of charm and humor. [11 Aug 1981, p.C8]

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

So resoundingly awful, there may be grounds to sue for mental suffering.

It’s hard to imagine this tale of tradition and miracles leading skeptics to contemplation, much less faith.

Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

How ironic then, in a movie about wordsmithing, that The Only Living Boy in New York is tripped up not by tawdry behavior, but by terrible writing.

Given these flaws, If Lucy Fell should be a chore, and yet I kept catching myself having a good time.

Well, it could have been good. But this goofy homage to Kiss fans gets dry mouth pretty fast.

Best of all is Keri Russell, who plays Adam Sandler's love interest and who brightens the tart rhubarb pie of her performance in "Waitress" with just a pinch of Disney sweetness.

A little more literary than lifelike, House of D is a story that feels too pat, and too perfect, for its own good.

A movie marred by a flaccid script, listless pacing, a plethora of cutesy-poo gags and Ray Romano.

My Favorite Martian never achieves anything that resembles farcical consistency, let alone farcical bliss, but it has enough playful nonsense scattered around a hit-and-miss scenario to rationalize a kiddie matinee excursion. [12 Feb 1999, p.C16]

Instead of prioritizing jump scares and game lore, as you might hope, the film leans into its gooey Hallmark center, focusing on underdeveloped relationships and predictable plot twists.

Class, a sexual disillusion acted out at the prep school level, would be represented far more accurately by the one-word title "Crass." [22 July 1983, p.C4]

Roger Spottiswoode's Air America is partly glorious, partly junk, but unfortunately not in equal parts.

The heart of the movie is in the right place. And although some of the acting from the younger stars comes across as amateurish, a few performances truly shine.

The one thing Edwards did right this time was to cast comic actor Roberto Benigni -- a big star in Italy -- as the illegitimate son of Jacques Clouseau, the accident-prone French detective who first appeared on the screen in The Pink Panther nearly 30 years ago. Benigni is enormously charming, a slight little fellow with a homely face that seems almost puppetlike and a flair for broad physical comedy.

An irredeemably transparent... DIRECT RIPPING OFF OF "SPEED."

Unnecessary and unfunny re-imagining of the classic satire by Jonathan Swift.

Awake is a pleasing if negligible diversion.

Martial arts maven Seagal has long been on deadly ground with critics, and this, his directorial debut, is likely to keep him there.

An extremely boyish ode to girl power.

There Be Dragons is like fine wine, served in a Big Gulp cup. A little is very nice. A lot is way too much.

More thoughtful than its cookie-cutter marketing campaign implies, and better than its awful title promises, "Love Happens" is the rare Hollywood romance concerned with emotions other than love at first sight.

Although genuinely gripping — at times, uncomfortably so — the tale of Lena and Daniel’s efforts to escape from Colonia and expose its abuses suffers from a heavy-handed telling.

The movie isn't only boring; it's troubling:

Pytka's marginally successful at setting this gambler's fantasy against the Damon Runyonesque aspects of the horsy life.

North, which co-producer Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman adapted from Zweibel's slight novel, is awkwardly structured -- it's still in chapters -- not to mention mean-spirited and incredibly stupid.

Why did director Barry Sonnenfeld take on this project? Just to sully a fine comedic resume that includes "The Addams Family" and "Get Shorty"? And one last one: Which one of these levers do you push to send the RV careering off the mountain for good?

Hews closely enough to the Sparks pattern of romance and bathos that tears will flow as copiously in the audience as they do on screen.

There are some very funny moments in the movie, even for grown-ups, including a video of Will that goes viral. The absurd machinations of Will’s smarmy political adviser are also good for a laugh. But ultimately, Annie is so fixated on being current that it will never be more than a passing fancy.

I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.

About half a notch above disaster.

It's all too, too cute and too, too forced for words -- not to mention too, too dark.

An insufferable piffle.

Isn't really a movie, it's only impersonating one.

What it possesses in heart and goodwill, it sorely lacks in narrative skill and artistic depth.

So stupid it makes "xXx: State of the Union" look like it was written by Nietzsche.

It's all good, stupid fun.

While Zhang is one of China’s greatest international stars, My Lucky Star is utterly provincial. It’s for Chinese viewers, plus those few westerners who revel in Asian hyper-cuteness.

An egregiously unfunny enterprise.

Essentially an extended cutesy session.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

It's a diatribe from beginning to end.

You can’t blame Will Smith for wanting to give his son a leg up in the business. Maybe one day Jaden will have his father’s career — and his ability to carry a movie. For now, it’s a little premature to ask him to bear the weight of this soggy, waterlogged “Earth” on his skinny shoulders.

If you're not rolling in the aisles, you're definitely in the wrong theater.

I suggest you RSVP in the negative to this "Wedding" invitation, unless you consider yourself a friend of the obvious bride to be, Ms. Lopez. But even then, you'll have to focus on her presence, rather than the silly ceremony around her.

There was absolutely no reason to make a new version of the 1970 comedy.

Class of 1999 gets a D for dumb, dull and derivative, and so what if director Mark Lester, who made "Class of 1984" eight years ago, is borrowing from himself? The latter was just a punked-up version of the original rock-and-roll high school film, "Blackboard Jungle." For this new venture, Lester has simply tacked on elements of "Westworld," "RoboCop" and "Terminator" in a blatant attempt to enroll the action faction.

It never makes you laugh that hard. Not even close. And so the thing becomes a bloody assault on the senses that commingles atrocity with tedium.

There are elements worth celebrating. The movie is thankfully less self-serious than the mopey “Twilight” films. The Mortal Instruments revels in its own camp. But there is plenty of room for improvement. The action flick is overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.

Unfortunately, The Man makes the mistake of assuming casting is all it takes to make a good comedy.

So loud, so long, so dumb.

A flagrantly vicious and broken-down murder melodrama that leaves recognizable fingerprints all over the place while making a chump of director William Friedkin. [13 Oct 1995, p.C16]

Rourke is, in fact, exceedingly creepy. There's an unpredictable, resonant menace in his eccentricity. But Cimino can't connect the movie's thriller elements to its themes. We end up spending way too much time indoors while this thug waves a gun at these poor innocents.

The story the film tells ruins the movie.

The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.

An hour and a half of real airplane turbulence is better than sitting through the bad, offensive material that makes up Soul Plane.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Even by Disney's formulaic standards -- is about as cut and dried as the phone book.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

Forsyth's script feels uncomfortably improvised, so almost all of the performances are hesitant and unconvincing. [06 May 1994]

People don’t go to Sparks movies for subtlety; they go to warm their hearts by bearing witness to true love. Of course, that requires a story that rings true. In The Longest Ride, authenticity is in short supply.

Like a Boss is the perfect airplane movie: something that won’t distract you terribly much while you work the New York Times crossword puzzle during a long flight, periodically looking up at the screen when the 2-year-old in the seat behind you kicks the back of your chair. Oh well. At least that way you won’t fall asleep.

A retread of just about every rom-com cliche ever turned.

Lacking in both inspiration and ingenuity, it doesn't so much spoof the conventions of the genre as dumb down famous -- and in some cases, forgotten -- scenes from a slew of other movies.

Don't hold your breath waiting for The Punisher to be original, not for one second of its torturous two hours.

Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and Irish director Pat O'Connor are absolutely out of their league, a couple of artists slumming, hoping to bring sensitivity to a genre that could well use it. But all they've done is make you appreciate the true value of the car chase.

This preposterous stalker flick, in fact, has less to do with America's favorite pastime or Gil's psychosis than with Hollywood's own obsession with blood sport. And for all British director Tony Scott knows about baseball, the thing might as well have been set in a cabbage patch.

Amusing premise, not-so-amusing execution.

A stunningly insipid romance, marks an all-time low for actor Zach Braff -- his "Gigli," if you will.

Extended scenes are dominated by heavy dialogue, while the lighter moments are relegated to montages of prancing across a beach, for example, which simply aren't that effective at buoying the drama.

If there is a Hell, Not Another Teen Movie will be playing for all eternity on every screen there.

The movie is neither good nor bad, but in its clever packaging of boy fantasy and girl fantasy, extremely cunning. As for Princess Diaz, no force on Earth can stop her now.

The problem is quantity. There are so many action sequences related to so many story lines that midway through an epic fight, you might find yourself wondering what exactly started this particular battle and what the objective is other than destruction for the sake of it.

The plot is paint by numbers, which puts pressure on the comedy to deliver. But it doesn’t.

Redeeming Love is an incident-rich saga populated by cardboard heroes and villains and outfitted with greeting-card sentiments and cartoon villainy.

UHF is not a uniformly funny experience, unless you have to wear a bib and tend to laugh at anything, such as sudden gusts of wind. Yankovic, co-writing with manager Jay Levey (who also directed), goes for gag after gag. Some hit, some miss. You laugh, you cry.

For a comedy, there are precious few real laughs. Three to be exact.

As dull as the decor in a Motel 6.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about I Love You, Beth Cooper is that the title is correctly punctuated. Beyond that, the movie is a disappointingly flabby teen flick.

You could call it a nightmare but that would be an insult to Elm Street.

There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.

The loudest, flashiest, silliest and longest blockbuster in a summer full of long, silly, flashy, loud blockbusters (long and silly "Transformers," flashy and loud "Wolverine").

Both a snore and utter tripe.

Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.

Much of the problem lies with Howell, a dilute, rabbity actor in the Tim Hutton mold. Everyone acts Howell off the screen, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, who displays an easeful gruffness as the girl who joins Jim. With Howell's weightlessness, the deeper elements of the story -- the byplay between guilt and innocence, for example -- never accumulate.

It’s all so plodding and grim, echoed by the blandly percussive score by Ramin Djawadi.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

None of this is by way of saying that Cats is bad, per se. In fact, some of the songs are pretty toe-tapping at times.

Kids should be reasonably diverted for a couple of hours, but odds are they'll have forgotten the whole thing by the next morning.

The premise of the movie deserves better.

It's cheap-looking (dinosaurs and other beasts here look like CGI loaners from Spielberg), deeply mediocre and predictable.

Filmmaker Paul Flaherty apparently has never so much as given a friend directions to his home.

Nobody really cares about the plot, least of all the filmmakers.

The more invested you are in the old-fashioned Robin Hood of legend — the less likely you are to enjoy what amounts to a chilly and flavorless frappé of historical speculation, revisionist folklore and every lazy action-movie cliche ever written.

Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.

The inside story is weak, dull and head-poundingly boring, and the outside story is only slightly better, thanks to the lukewarm likability of its two stars.

Size vanquishes both substance and subtlety in the overhyped, half-cocked and humorless resurrection of dear old "Godzilla."

For all the nice turns, this movie can't decide whether to focus on undergraduate fun and fantasy or the tensions of the workaday world. As a result, the film fails to deliver its promised exploration of the last week of summer, when some people find themselves with no way to turn back, and no place to look forward to. [01 Oct 1984, p.B3]

Despite the plentiful blood-letting, it's all staggeringly inconsequential. The Evil That Men Do trivializes a timely theme -- human rights abuses. [25 Sep 1984, p.C1]

A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.

A gooey romantic comedy that sticks to everything except its principles.

Dull and unimaginative, Chetwynd treats his characters with such reverence that they might as well be saints in striped prison pajamas, martyred for the sake of some robotic patriotism. At least, his villains stand out from the host of underdeveloped heroes. Boob journalists, a doofus peacenik actress and a Cuban goon -- Michael Russo, who seems to think he's playing a pimp on "Miami Vice" -- add the unintentional comic relief.

The first “Transporter” delivered an unexpected kick, courtesy of Statham, who made for a brooding, magnetic — and reliably kinetic — action hero. Skrein is an inferior stand-in, scowling like his predecessor, but lacking Statham’s cool, coiled power.

Troop Beverly Hills is a dog of a movie, one of those nasty little yappy dogs with fancy hairdos, pedicures and pedigrees.

Pirates hasn't got an ounce of excitement -- or at least it hasn't excited composer Philippe Sarde, whose score is the symphonic equivalent of Muzak and is rarely wedded to what we see on the screen. So what's left is a pricey playpen for Polanski's sense of perversity. [19 July 1986, p.G1]

Beyond ­middle-schoolers, it’s unclear who would enjoy this derivative, cliche-filled exercise in horror lite.

From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.

Weekend at Bernie's is an unfettered but uninspired one-joke movie.

There's a lot of ski footage here, but most of it is pretty standard beer commercial stuff. And the characters are on about the same level. Writer-director Patrick Hasburgh may know something about skiing, but he knows nothing about people. Or storytelling. Or filmmaking.

This time-travel scenario is by now shopworn, and the normally riotous Lawrence, a manic and gifted clown, is hamstrung in his efforts to eke humor from the anemic script.

So pleased with its own spoofy conceit it stays in annoyingly self-amused, predictable mode.

It's a pretty scathing satire of reality TV, including itself, which makes it both what it is, and a critique of what it is.

While by no means a masterpiece, the comedy, by Canadian director Ken Scott, is a careful calibration of crass gags and genuine sentiment that succeeds more often than it fails.

It ain’t worth the price of admission, but it is, in one of the drowsiest, dullest summer movies ever, a bit of an eye-opener.

There's a nagging question at the heart of Chernobyl Diaries. It isn't what, or who, is stalking these kids. After awhile, the answer becomes apparent, leading to a denouement that, while mildly exciting, feels like a ride you've been on before.

Repo Men grafts moral ambiguity onto the action thriller, and the result is a weird but likably misshapen beast.

Lamentably short of sense and acting skill but extravagantly long on choreographic combat, Revenge of the Ninja supplies a mock-bloody feast of acrobatic punching, vaulting, cutting and thrusting for presumably insatiable martial arts fans. [28 Sep 1983, p.B11]

Xanadu cannot possibly be described as a good movie, but it can be recommended to those who can tolerate large amounts of intravenous marzipan. The music is highly enjoyable -- though perhaps more so once one gets the record album home and isn't bothered with the story -- and the film so unerringly airy that it has a beneficent, tranquilizing, bemusing effect.

Will Gluck directs with frantic, go-for-broke pacing, which is what you do when your reserves of wit are bankrupt.

The Blue Lagoon is a plump sitting duck, waiting to be roasted by sarcastic spectators. But director Randal Kleiser and his associates may enjoy the last laugh at the box office if this oblivious romantic idyll connects with susceptibilities as naive and dumb-founding as their own.

This highly stylized adaptation of the popular Max Payne video game is 70 percent dark, snowy atmospherics and 30 percent loud, violent action.

It's all too silly to bother. Without style and attitude, nothing gets old faster than horror.

As directed by Perry, The Single Moms Club goes for a mix of escapism and reality-based drama and winds up with a movie that can only be enjoyed via the running, snarky commentary that will inevitably scroll through most audience members’ heads as they watch.

By and large the film seems humorless, the reflection of exhausted or snide entertainers. [21 June 1978, p.B13]

Genre aficionados looking for chills and thrills will be disappointed; this one could play uncut on television -- network, not cable. The effects and the jokes are equally few and far between, and for all its amiable intentions, House II deserves few boarders.

Moon has lots of setup but no resolution, treading water for most of its overlong running time.

Screenwriter and sometime animal trainer Stewart Raffill directs from a screenplay by Ed Rugoff, who also co-wrote "Mannequin." Rugoff is fond of asking and answering the question, what if a mannequin came to life? But judging from "Mannequin Two," Raffill is probably better at sweeping up after elephants. The actors, bless their little wooden heads, would be better off pulling puppet strings.

Edwards persists in the missing-person subterfuge in Curse while avoiding the blatant outrage of recycling old footage under false pretenses. He's shot new footage this time, but that technicality hasn't prevented it from feeling depleted and secondhand. [17 Aug 1983, p.B6]

Despite classy lead performances by Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde, the movie, from horror factory Blumhouse (known for cranking out sequels in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, among others), relies too heavily on reanimated monster movie cliches and scientific gibberish to keep it alive.

Suffice it to say, there is no comedy, no chemistry, no nothing in this movie.

At times, it's downright nasty; and that's when I like it best.

Smurfs may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

Wes Craven, who started the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, should know a lot better.

While this reboot is fun, it’s also forgettable and occasionally infuriating.

Just another thriller, utterly disposable.

While the chemistry between characters is impressive and the comic delivery spot-on, the jokes feel unoriginal.

Grown-ups might not roll over for Show Dogs, but children almost surely will. With its fart jokes and smart-alecky canines, this talking-animal comedy is aimed at a young audience anyway. For dog-loving adults, well, it’s just engaging enough to make them prick up their ears.

Even this garbage-can world deserves a better grade of junk. [7 Aug 1980, p.B4]

Nearly unwatchable.

With The Hollywood Knights, Floyd Mutrux, the director of "American Hot Wax," seems determined to wear out the welcome of a once-amusing nostalgic device once and for all.

Made for an audience mostly too young to have held the funny pages of a newspaper, it’s a madcap heist flick that feels like someone grabbed a random screenplay and scrawled “Garfield” at the top.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

That's My Boy is radical only in its extreme laziness.

Unfortunately, the film, written and directed by Sue Kramer, starts with a distinctly uncomfortable moral baseline: How exactly is any audience supposed to identify with a character whose relationship with her brother borders on the incestuous?